By Gianni Salisbury | UConn Journalism
April 28, 2026
Grief is not linear. It’s like quicksand.
One day when you think you’re taking steps forward to heal from the death of someone you love, you step into quicksand. Suddenly you feel like you’re sinking, being pulled down by trauma and grief.
This is how University of Kentucky senior Caroline Cygan describes the feeling that hits when grief starts to consume her. Cygan lost her brother Christian to Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy, or SUDEP, in 2022. She was in her sophomore year of college as a neuroscience student. He was 21.
“Losing someone specifically during college is just so disorienting, because you feel like you’re in this whole other space while everyone else is in the college world. I remember during the first year I had a lot of brain fog because I couldn’t cope. You’re just trying your best,” Cygan said.
Like others who suffer loss in college, Cygan reached out for support from her professors while experiencing periods of intense grief – grief that would hit even years later in ways that ranged from insomnia and hypochondria to tension headaches and chest pain.
She says she did not find that support from some of her professors. And she isn’t alone.
Each year, more than 4 million college and university students “are socially and academically impacted by bereavement,” according to Evermore, a nonprofit group that focuses on helping people through grief and loss. Evermore, which advocates for higher-education institutions to adopt student bereavement-leave policies, adds that only a small fraction of such institutions – a little more than 1 percent – have formal accommodations for students.
Cygan is part of a push to adopt student bereavement policies at her university. That idea is gaining momentum throughout the U.S.
New push for student bereavement policies
Until 2011, Ball State University in Indiana was the only accredited college in the U.S. to have a bereavement leave policy for students. Meanwhile, Dr. Heather L. Servaty-Seib was a professor of counseling psychology at nearby Purdue University, conducting a study on the effects of grief on student academics.
She would find that 227 students at her university who reported experiencing the death of a family member or friend also saw a drop in academic performance during the semester the loss occurred, with lower GPAs than a non-bereaved group.
After publishing that study in 2006, Servaty-Seib began pushing for student bereavement strategies. With the help of the student government in 2011, Purdue University approved a bereavement leave policy called the Grief Absence Policy for Students.
Servaty-Seib and a colleague continued to advocate for grief policies, however, and in a Journal of College Student Development article published in 2019 they wrote that such policies show respect and empathy for students, help students succeed in the long run, promote consistency and allow students to contact a single source, rather than each of their professors, when they’ve experienced the death of a loved one.
And it’s not a minor consideration. Servaty-Seib says studies show from 37–44% of college students experience the death of a loved one during any two-year period in college.
Servaty-Seib, who’s now the senior associate vice provost for teaching and learning at Purdue, has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology and specializes in the study of death and dying, called thanatology. She said in a recent phone interview that in talking to students over the years about grief, they report having difficulty getting time off from class and accommodations because the professors think they’re lying to get an extension.
Most of the time, she says, that isn’t the case.
“There’s lots of jokes out there that I see online with people saying, ‘Oh, I have a test coming, all the grandparents are going to die,’” Servaty-Seib said. “But the reason that professors only hear about it when there’s an exam is because if nothing’s happening on that day of class and students have a death,” they just won’t go to class and won’t tell the professor.
Meanwhile, many college students find that no set guidelines or policies exist at their schools to determine if they’re eligible for leave or extended deadlines. They may be instructed to consider taking an incomplete for the class, making up the work later or taking a break from college all together.
Since publishing her initial study in 2006, Servaty-Seib has advocated for student bereavement policies at Actively Moving Forward conferences, a student nationwide chapter organization for bereaved students. In 2015, she published a book called “We Get It,” a collection of 33 stories by bereaved students and young adults. In that time, Servaty-Seib’s research and policies became a blueprint for implementing bereavement policies at many other schools.
By 2019, Servaty-Seib says, 44 colleges among the nation’s 3,043 accredited colleges had adopted bereavement leave policies. Evermore puts that number at 100. Schools on the list include Boston University, University of Baltimore and Oakland University.
Purdue’s rules
Purdue’s Grief Absence Policy provides students with the number of days they can take after a death, depending on their relationship with the deceased. If the relationship isn’t specifically covered by the policy, students request an absence through the Office of the Dean of Students.
To apply for the leave, students must submit a Grief Absence Request Form, which sends an absence notification to their instructors and requires documentation of the death or funeral service. If approved, students will be excused from class and allowed to make up missed work or assessments.
Servaty-Seib says she finds that professors may dislike losing control over decisions concerning classwork and attendance. But she has found that once professors learn they don’t have to determine if a student is telling the truth about a death they are more likely to support the policy.
“All we’re asking for is for the students to have the same rights” as professors, Servaty-Seib said.
Other schools have adopted similar types of bereavement policies, with some differences in the amount of days students get off or how students notify the school of a death.
Working toward a how-to guide
Today, Servaty-Seib provides advice and resources to colleges working toward implementing bereavement policies. She’s creating a toolkit in collaboration with Evermore for colleges and students to use when pushing for bereavement policies at their schools. Servaty-Seib explains that for years she would send resources over to students and college organizations looking to implement bereavement policies and this toolkit is an accumulation of that.
“It is a document that is going to walk people through, how do you build rationale and argue for the need for a policy like this on your campus?” she said, adding: “You can connect it to the mission of the institution. It helps you figure out who needs to be involved in the process – who are the voices that will most likely be listened to.”
The toolkit, which will include three parts, will provide data, policy ideas and promotion plans.
Red Douglas, the manager of Higher Education Initiatives at Evermore and a graduate student at Oakland University, is also working on the toolkit.
He says he became interested in working with grieving students after his father died while he was in college. As a graduate student, he worked toward enacting bereavement policies at Oakland. Now he works with students from other schools who are trying to get bereavement policies put in place. He says in a recent interview that the process varies from school to school.
“The University of Maryland – those girls have been fighting tooth and nail for 10 years to try to get one, and Maryland will not budge on it,” he said. “The University of Kentucky is getting really close. They were successful at Gonzaga. We are working very closely with Santa Clara as well.”
Douglas says continuing to spread the idea of bereavement policies is also important. He hopes the toolkit and the work of Servaty-Seib will continue to inspire people at different universities to push for bereavement policy.
“Are we there yet?” he asked. “No. We have lots of work to be done, but because of people like Heather … it’s allowed later generations like me and now even you, another generation behind me, to continue picking this up and doing it.”
The question is: Do bereavement policies work?
Data are lacking as to whether these policies prove effective in helping students through grief. Servaty-Seib says she hopes to conduct studies on this in the future, but for now the evidence is largely anecdotal.
A 2025 study that looks at support in general for grieving students indicates that “short-term, crisis-oriented focus often leaves gaps in ongoing emotional support for bereaved students, highlighting the need for stronger, long-term planning.”
Cygan, the University of Kentucky student, says she would like to create a bereavement policy at her school that not only helps students when they lose a loved one, but long after. She says she believes many people view the loss as a “one-time event” a young person will get over.
“But that’s the thing about grief … it’s not like that,” she said.
She recalls that around the time of her brother’s birthday last year she starting having many of the PTSD symptoms she’d initially suffered from – a phenomenon often referred to as an “anniversary effect.” Cygan says she reached out to one of her professors to ask for accommodations for a physics exam. He declined her request.
“His response was, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’” Cygan said. When she asked the teaching assistant about the response, she says, the TA responded: “‘You’ll be OK. I think the professor’s just going take it easy on people with this test.’ It just felt very dismissing. It didn’t feel like they actually understood. It felt very impersonal, and it felt like I was an inconvenience.”
Many other college students share their own experiences in online forums dedicated to dealing with the death of a loved one in college, often saying they felt dismissed by professors in seeking accommodations or extensions.
And universities that lack student bereavement leave may have a few options for students experiencing grief.
The University of Connecticut is among those institutions with no set bereavement policy, opting instead to deal with such situations on a case-by-case basis. Students are urged to meet with the Dean of Students office to discuss their options, which could include taking an extended leave for the semester, reducing their course load or requesting an incomplete for a class. The office will work with faculty to help students.
UConn’s associate dean and director of the Dean of Students office is Maureen Armstrong. She writes in an email that the office regularly meets with students who are struggling from the death of a family member or friend, whether they come in on their own or are referred.
“We will go over as many options as we can to help the student make an informed decision,” Armstrong writes. “Many students stay enrolled and work with us for flexibility on due dates when possible or the incomplete option. If a student decided stepping away is the best option, we will help them with that and go over the process of readmission for when they are ready to return.”
Armstrong says if a student misses class the office will ask professors for flexibility in making up the work. The office also refers students to UConn’s Student Health and Wellness mental health and ensures students are aware of services such as grief loss groups and counseling available on campus, in addition to yoga, meditation, pet therapy and UConn Faith. If a student has lost a parent, the discussion could involve financial aid and steps the student might take to adjust it.
She adds that the Dean of Students office helps students who have suffered a loss to reschedule final exams and that experts there often meet with students more than once.
“We also may not meet with a student right after the loss but down the road, they discover the grief is more than they can manage and we will help them,” Armstrong writes.
Other colleges have similar options, or none at all.
That’s a bit surprising to Servaty-Seib, who says that bereavement policies do exist on the kindergarten through 12 level.
As for Cygan, she’s hopeful the University of Kentucky will soon become one of the colleges that has set bereavement leave policies. Cygan says she’s in talks with the Student Government Association and plans to present a proposed policy soon. If the SGA passes the policy, it will go before the university’s board of trustees.
The proposal calls for seven non-consecutive excused absences for students who lose an immediate family member or close friend, and three for extended family members. It also asks for excused absences for significant milestones such as anniversaries, birthdays or key moments tied to a loved one’s illness or death, along with deadline extensions for assignments that fall around those dates. Professors would be asked to offer flexibility with coursework and exams during periods of bereavement, and the university would give clear guidelines on how students can request accommodations and how faculty should respond.
“The biggest thing that I want to see is that kids feel like they can navigate this better and have an immediate resource, rather than feeling like they’re just kind of more isolated and alienated,” Cygan said.
She will graduate before the policy is voted upon but says she plans on staying involved, using a gap year after graduation to continue pushing for it. After that, she plans to return to school to become a physician’s assistant. Cygan says she wants to use everything she has learned through this experience in her work as a PA.
“We talk about emotional intelligence and healthcare, but I think it can be extended so much more beyond just understanding what the patient’s going through,” she said. “Having psych knowledge, I think that we need to be approaching patient care a lot differently than we do, and actually evaluating patients’ needs.”
Resources for those seeking to create bereavement policies at their schools can be found at the Evermore HELP Toolkit.
This story was supported by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network. UConn Journalism is a foundational member of the CT Student Journalism Collaborative, which was chosen to participate in the Solutions Journalism Network Student Media Challenge cohort for 2025–26.